Laptop And Car

Stay on the worst of laptop, they’re tough to fix, and they die young. Laptops last, on average, three to four years as compared to the healthier four to five years of the average desktop, according to IDC. Even worse, anecdotal evidence indicates many truly mobile laptops never make it past the 2 to 3 year mark.

Not only do laptops live shorter and more difficult lives than desktops, they definitely go down fighting which is to say they give IT departments a much harder time when it comes to upgrades and repairs.

Today’s laptops are built just like today’s cars, says Matthew Archibald, senior director of global information security and risk management at Applied Materials Inc. in Santa Clara, Calif. Buy a new car, and the owner’s manual will tell you to change the timing belt at 50,000 miles, he explains. If you don’t do it, the timing belt will go at exactly 51,000 miles. It’s a kind of built-in obsolescence, Archibald says, and he sees the exact same scenario with laptops.

“As the cost of laptops has come down, the parts from drives to boards last a certain length of time and that’s it,” he says. “Add to that the fact that they’re tougher to work on, take more expertise and create potentially a lot longer downtime to fix if they have to be shipped to a service center, they’re very frustrating.”

Applied Materials, which has gone almost completely mobile, has more than 12,000 laptops deployed. Archibald likes to do a technology refresh every two to three years on laptops, but in recent years, it’s much closer to two years “because the hardware starts to fail.”

Motherboards are often the first thing to go, hard drives may need to be updated, and smaller things like the screen hinges or the locking switch fail, too. But Archibald employs a hard and fast rule: If it costs more than $300 to refresh, it’s time for a new machine.